One night, with burnout as my only companion, I let myself drift along with the flow of Everlast (remember House of Pain? Go listen to his solo albums—you won’t regret it). I scribbled down these words to describe the end of a relationship, one that ended in sadness, but also because we were no longer in sync. We had different expectations: she was moving forward toward her destiny no matter what, while I was stumbling, searching for a crutch that always seemed out of reach.
What struck me the most in this story were the unsettling similarities between her father’s life and mine, even though we were separated by a thousand kilometers and had never met. I was stunned. She, on the other hand, hadn’t noticed or understood those parallels, and I found myself alone, bewildered, staring at what she presented as her origins—while unknowingly overlaying them with a canvas that looked just like mine. A thousand kilometers apart, two lives had followed similar paths: one under capitalism, the other under communism.